Yahoo Is On Move Again!

And Yes, Yahoo is now on move again. According to Sharad Verma Of Yahoo! Search they are rolling out some new features added in their algorithm to rank websites in next coming days. SO be ready to see some changes in your yahoo rankings.

Plus Yahoo announces support for X robot tags in http headers for no index, noindex, nofollow and nosnippet functions. Previously you can use these tags within html only but from now on you can use it in http header which gives you more flexibility to achieve exclusions on PDF, Word documents, PowerPoint, video, and other file types including html files. Here are some examples of using X robot Tags given by yahoo:

• X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX -- If you don't want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.

Note: We'll still need to crawl the page to see and apply the tag, so if you don't wish to have the page crawled, use robots disallow on robots.txt.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE -- If you don't want to display cache link in the search results page.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET -- If you don't want to display summary in the search results page.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW -- If you don't want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.

You can read full story here LINK

Google Adsense Is Down

Just went to log in and check Google AdSense and what i forund there is that Google Adsense is temporarily down. On Saturday, 10 November 2007 at 6:36 p.m. GMT. Interestingly Google is showing Temporarily Unavailable message in 23 different languages. Here is a screen shot of Google Adsense Down. Even the logo of Google Adsense is not showing.

Click To Enlarge

Its Time To Rebel Against Google!

As many of you read about the recent issue of Search Engine Guide and their Surrender Letter. My opinion is that this issue is more serious than it looks. Of course many of us find this post cool and hilarious but please think again what does it all means?

Do we have no choice anymore?

There is no doubt that if not all than almost all of the blogs, websites, forums etc get most of their traffic via Google Search Engine and dammit!! Google knows it too. So it knows that whatever it decides will be followed by website owners, whether it makes them happy or angry. But THEY HAVE NO CHOICE ANYMORE.

It’s crystal clear now that Google is super power of the internet world. Whatever it decides has to be obeyed, if not, then it means total abandonment by the internet society.

Take an example of Google OpenSocial Platform. It literally taking revenge from Facebook for making a deal with Microsoft rather than the Great Google.

Ever care to wonder about Google Policy?

Introduce something...make users accustomed to it..give them time ...so that they become addicted to it...then implement Google Rules over it.

There remains only two choices...continue with Google Rules and you will no problems, if not, go somewhere else which means no where because Google has monopolized the search engine market, leaving Google currently means suicide for the businesses which are dependant on its searching capabilities.

I think its time we should take Google Free Friday campaigns seriously. If all the SEO's make up their mind on this, than I think its not hard to make Msn or Yahoo or any other search engine as competitive as Google. It is because of us that Google has thrived and we can bring it down too. The entire buzz creator’s are one of us. All the big players are SEO’s. All the authority belongs to us. Only SEO's can change this Google Scenario otherwise no one can, and if we don’t than wait for more terrible things that will eventually come!!

The time to take a decision has come.

BE A GOOGLE SLAVE

or

LET IT KNOW WHO GIVES IT THAT POWER

It’s up to you. I hope some big players of our industry may take a decision about it.

Happy Weekend!

Google Video Units

Google just announced the availability of Google Video Units. Video Units are the videos from YouTube partners having adds within them. The ads within the video unit are targeted based on a combination of the video content and the publisher’s site content or you can chose the categories. Video units may display two types of ads:

• Text overlay ads, which are displayed in the bottom 20% of the video as it plays
• Companion ads, which appear above the video content within the player

The ads displayed can be either contextually targeted or site-targeted, and may be paid on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impressions basis. The new video units are customizable and look better than the standard YouTube player.

Google has previously begun placing video ads on sites that are part of the AdSense network and YouTube too has been experimented recently to test ads that played during the video, its first time that Google offering to blend ads with YouTube content.

Here is the official press release by Google. LINK
And On Adsense Blog. LINK

MSN Live Webmaster Portal

So after Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer, SEO'z and webmasters are waiting for something similar from Microsoft and here it is at-last...Live Search Webmaster Portal. It is definitely a good effort from MSN to take SEO seriously. As reporting in their Official Blog, MSN Webmaster Portal initially offers

• Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSN Bot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
• Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
• Statistics about your website
• Consolidation of content submission resources
• New content and community resources

Since its Beta version also not available publicly instead Microsoft invite people to send emails to participate and enjoy that beta version of their webmaster portal. The email is : lswmp@microsoft.com

Here is the original post on Microsoft official blog. LINK

Doctor Google

So Google decided to get in another highly profitable market by announcing(OK.. not announced yet but will shortly) Google Health. A new project to store a patient complete medical history.

This project is codenamed 'WEAVER' and its purpose is to store health information of an individual in a computerized or more specifically in an Online-Way. This will not diagnose an illness of patient but collect patients medical data and let it share with Health Care Service Providers (Hint For Monetize). Ask.com has already introduced a feature Health Smart Answers. Smart Answers shows trusted medical info and appears above the regular result when a search related to some disease or health condition performed. All content and images are provided by Healthline Networks & Revolution Health. Search engine journal reporting here: LINK. Here is an image shot of Ask Smart Answers.

Here are the images in fact FIRST IMAGES Of Google Health by BlogScoped. LINK

And MSN is also planning to come in the Health vector as reported by Marketing Pilgrim Here: LINK

So wait and see when Yahoo decide to participate in the race.

Google Office

So Microsoft is in some real trouble now. Google Docs & Spreadsheets don't hurt Microsoft office seriously, but now its change cause Google combine with Star Office, a professional office suit for business, and offering it free with Google Pack. (Get One Free Here : LINK).

Star office is a fully functional and productive software suite that has enough feature to satisfy a business user needs. Google is targeting Microsoft Office users aggressively to get business users.

According To Google about this deal.

“We partnered with Sun to make a free version of StarOffice available in the Google Pack because we believe that users will benefit from access to a free, full-featured office suite for the desktop. And we’ve also always believed that users should have choice in their online and PC experience.”

New Yahoo Is Live!

The New Yahoo Is Out!

Yahoo has started making its testing version of New UI live.

The new Yahoo User inetrface has a drop down search assitant, which have some really useful search sugegstions. Beside the normal suggestions it also offering an option entiled as Explore Concepts, which search the specifc keywords withind results. For example If you search "Yahoo testing new" It gives normal suggestion "Yahoo testing New Home" plus it also offers to refine the results by showing those having words "Yahoo Seach Marketing" in them. You can turn this Search Assistant Off too.

Yahoo logo is on the top right corner in the new Yahoo User Interface.

Here are some snapshots of new user interface of Yahoo Search. Enjoy!

THE NEW HOME PAGE OF YAHOO SEARCH ENGINE

NEW SEARCH RESULT PAGE

THE SEARCH ASSISTANT

THE NEW SHORT CUTS AND LOT OF ADDS

THE BOTTOM LINE

seo blog -
Employee Scheduling Software

MICROSOFT PRIVACY POLICY

Ok. First we see a great step from ASk.com, launching of Ask Eraser that allow users to erase their search history, and then Google at last reducing their cookie expiration period from 2038 to 18 months. Now yahoo and Microsoft also comin with same steps towards Privacy Protection. According to Wall Street Journal, Yahoo will announce in coming days, plans for a policy to make all of a user’s search data anonymous within 13 months of receiving it.

Msn is an step ahead from yahoo and officially announce a privacy policy on 22nd July, according to which

Microsoft® Windows Live™ users can make search query data anonymous after 18 months by permanently removing cookie IDs, the entire IP address and other identifiers from search terms. Microsoft will also work to give customers more control over what information it uses to personalize their online search experience.

Moreover Microsoft also announce that

Microsoft will join the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) later this year when it begins to offer third-party ad serving broadly.

Microsoft Press Release

New Google Tag

According to Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, Google Tag Library got a new addition of “UNAVAILABLE_AFTER” tag.

That tag basically describe about the content that which will got expired or removed from a site after a specific period of time and that page will no longer be available for crawl.

This tag is highly useful for websites that uses Season Offer Marketing technique or announce some special offers time by time.

Another good use for this tag is making a content public for some time and after a that time make it private or so called PREMIUM CONTENT.

Well the tag is out and its definitely a good addition in Google’s tag library.

Yahoo Suggest Feature

A Little Intro….

So the hot buzz in SEO world is about new feature in Yahoo. Suggest Feature

Now when You types something in search box yahoo will show some suggestion related to text that you type in in a drop-down box.

Its not a new feature. Google has this feature with suggestion limit to one; named as DID YOU MEAN. Plus Google has a product for this in its lab too named as Google Suggest.

Here is a screen shot of both searches

Yahoo Search Screen Shot

Google Suggest Screen Shot

But there is something more …. if you go to Yahoo Search Engine(search.yahoo.com) only its not showing this feature however if you do a search from main page of yahoo you will see that feature. Has anyone else noted that too? Take a look at that

Anyone else noted something more? Please share with us.